Remote Control

Remote Control

Why is it that everything that we own that has any piece of electronics in it comes with a remote control. Your TV, your VCR, Blu-ray disk, your sound system, your cable box, all have their own remotes. With the advent of smartphones now you can have as many apps to control things.

This always created a problem for me early on. I would want to watch a certain program and then also play sound through speakers, but the program was on the VCR, but the sound was coming from somewhere else. Well, the Cable box had to be on in order to play the video I wanted, for it was channeled from the VCR to the Cable Box. Then, of course, the TV had to be on. And if you had to change to live TV it required reconfiguring each remote.  Very frustrating.

Then someone created a multi-remote. This allowed you to program all your other remotes, mostly, into this new remote, so that now all you needed was one remote to use. Of course, a degree in engineering and remote design was needed in order to program each component of this new remote, but we managed. I should say I managed. Others in my household just accepted the fact that this new remote worked and pushed whatever button I said would work.

But then the TV breaks and you need a new TV and now you have to find the multi-function remote and remember how you configured it the first time. Yes, it was an endless process.

And what do you do with all of the other remotes? Keep them in a box and hope that someday when you give away a device you remember which remote went to it? Pretty much that’s what we did.

My favorite remote was the TV one that my son at a very early age broke. I could no longer use it, so I replaced with a new multi-function one. The new one never did all the old things that the original one did.

Instead of throwing away the broken remote, I kept it. Not that I was planning on foisting it on the person we gave the 13” TV to. I just felt that maybe someday I could either fix it or use the parts to fix something else.

It became a very important remote as my son grew a little older and had trouble sleeping, with the fears of bad dreams and such. I gave him the remote, which he had no memory of breaking, and told him that it was used for sleeping problems. If he woke up having a bad dream, all he had to do was pick up the remote and change channels and he would find a different, more pleasant dream to have. I guess it worked because we had fewer sleep issues.

Now that he’s grown up and married. I still have the remote in case he needs it at some future time, though my guess is that he is more likely to pull up a video game controller or whatever app is on his phone to reset whatever is troubling him or someone else in his family.

Personally, I’m waiting for that remote myself.